Brown Continues Series of Hearings on Earmarking
House science committee chairman George Brown (D-CA) continued his fight against academic earmarking with two more in a series of hearings. On September 22, the committee heard from representatives of institutions receiving earmarked funds in the FY 1992 DOD appropriations bill; on October 6 Deputy Secretary of Defense John Deutch and DOE officials testified that while they opposed earmarking, they attempted to follow “congressional intent.”
Earmarking occurs when a Member of Congress designates a specific project or institution for funding, circumventing a competitive, peer-reviewed funding process. The university witnesses concurred with Brown when he stated that “earmarking is not necessarily a dirty word;" it is due in part to “the failure of Congress to...establish a process for funding academic infrastructure.” Vociferously defending the practice, Boston University president John Silber said that “if there was a program through which we could find funding for [research] infrastructure,” the university would do so, but in the absence of such a program, “either the country stagnates or we do what we need to do.” Sister Mary Reap of Marywood College (PA), which received money to study military family life and women’s issues, remarked that there were no peer-review funds available for research on those issues. Billy Covington of Sam Houston State University (TX) explained that his institution had proposed interdisciplinary environmental studies at a time when “funding agencies weren’t geared for interdisciplinary programs.”
Silber called earmarking and peer-review “apples and oranges:" while peer-review has always been the accepted way to competitively select investigators for individual research grants, there is no comparable program for infrastructure. “If Congress wants to put a blind eye to the facilities problem” and do nothing to authorize such a program, he said, institutions will find another way to get facilities funding.
Brown began the October 6 hearing by stating that “the whole [earmarking] process is basically immoral and runs contrary to the principles on which this country is based.” As an example he noted that the majority of academic earmarks in the annual DOD bills go to the 12th congressional district of Pennsylvania, for which the representative is John Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. Deutch maintained that earmarking is primarily a congressional problem. Brown took Deutch to task for DOD’s not providing the House science committee with all requested documents on the department’s budget. He also took “slight umbrage” at Deutch’s effort to “put it all on Congress.”
DOE officials testified that it was their policy to try to follow any earmarks received in statutory (bill) or report language, although they worked with the recipient institution to make the grants as relevant to DOE’s mission as possible. Brown commented that DOE “is one of the most abused departments with respect to earmarking... You’ve been a real patsy for Members of Congress who want to do earmarks.” When DOE chief financial officer Joseph Vivona noted that academic earmarks within DOE had declined in the past three years, Ranking Minority Member Robert Walker (R-PA) acknowledged that it was “in large part due to the courage of George Brown,” who recognized that “earmarks were destroying the science base of the country.”
